The Zero

by Jess Walter

  This is a life, he thought, smooth skipping stones bounding across the surfaces of time, with brief moments of deepened consciousness as you hit the water before going airborne again, flying across the carpool lane, over weeks at a desk, enjoying yourself when the skipping stopped, and spending the rest of your life in a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness, lost weekends, the glow from television sets warming placid faces, smile lines growing in the glare of the screen. He drained his wine.

  It was cool on the balcony. Remy drank in deep breaths of city air. The steaks smelled so good he could barely stand it, and his eyes watered as he reached for the cover of the grill as—

  HE SAT in his car, disoriented, wondering if the gaps were somehow widening. Maybe it had to with the car, because the worst skips often occurred like this, when he was on the road, or waiting in traffic, only to look up and find himself in a tunnel or on the turnpike, with no clue where he was going or where he’d been (one time he found himself wet to his waist, reeking of sewage) or when he’d suddenly find himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, parked outside a building, a notebook open in his lap and binoculars around his neck.

  This time, he immediately looked around the car for his binoculars, figuring that he was on some kind of assignment he’d have to piece together later, or simply abandon. But he quickly realized that he had no binoculars and no notebook. He was in the suburbs somewhere. And that’s when he became reoriented and recognized the neighborhood, and Carla and Steve’s big house, in a herd of similar big houses grazing in a cul-de-sac on a gradual hillside, this neighborhood that couldn’t be more than two years old, where, Steve had once confided, there were four basic models, and his—the one with brick façades and pillared front porches—was the most expensive, an extra hundy thou.

  Remy checked his watch. Quarter past three. Okay, so what was he doing here at three fifteen in the afternoon? He was wearing khaki slacks and a zippered jacket. He wasn’t in front of Edgar’s house, but four houses down the block. He looked around the neighborhood. For the most part, the lawns were obscenely green, like wet moss; in some of them you could still see the seams where new sod had been rolled out—perfect little patches like felt on a pool table. How many turns of a lawn mower? Four? Five? And yet, in front of some of the houses, this little patch of grass was already beginning to die in places, brown circles like age spots where the roots hadn’t been able to take hold. And there were sickly trees, too, in most of the yards, still young, lashed to stakes and bundled in burlap turtlenecks. Little yellow ribbons were tied around the thin trunks, like scarves above sweaters.

  Remy heard the squeak of hydraulic brakes, and watched in his rearview mirror as a school bus stopped at the corner behind him; then came the sigh of the bus door, and Edgar and another boy stepped off the bus, trudging off in different directions, without saying a word to one another, like duelers who forgot to turn and fight. The stop sign came in, the lights blinked off, and the bus rumbled on, Edgar bouncing to the beat in his tiny headphones as he walked on the sidewalk toward Carla’s house on the other side of the street. He looked good, though it was hard to tell in his baggy clothes, the hooded sweatshirt and pants bunched up at the ankles of his floppy tennis shoes. Remy thought he saw Edgar steal a glance toward his car, but the boy just kept walking toward his house as if he hadn’t noticed his dad. He paused at the mailbox, took out some catalogs, and continued to the house, up the steps to the pillared porch, fished in his pocket for a key, put it in the door, and disappeared inside. Remy thought he saw the boy’s face appear briefly in one of the windows, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. A few minutes later the boy came out, wearing the same clothes, and loped off again, without a glance in the direction of his father’s car.

  Remy sat there a moment, trying to imagine what he’d wanted to say to the boy, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Hell, that didn’t seem so strange either, now that he thought about it—a father unsure what to say to his boy, haunting his kid’s adolescence. After a minute he started his car and drove away.

  SOMETHING FAMILIAR in the flow of people past him, something he recalled from that day, moving against the current, a barely civilized rush on tight stairs, but reversed, like a photographic negative: They were climbing the stairs he descended. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” Remy said, his shoulders turned, hands and arms and knees grazing him as he passed, although no one paid him any attention, either before or after he begged their pardon. They looked past him with pleading eyes, their hands high, as if ready at any moment to begin pushing to escape this subway station. They were intimately familiar, these faces, with their constrained lust for escape, barely held panic, an underground face, an elevator face, a train station face. He’d seen people hold their breath in crowds; now he saw it again, as they came up, clutching their handbags and briefcases and shopping bags like they were babies, pulling at their actual kids’ arms like luggage on the way to a late flight, muttering Come on come on come on, and craning their necks to see what was taking so long at the top of the stairs, where others emerged onto the rain-spackled street and…Air! Did any city value air more than this one now? Near the bottom the faces were more frantic; tears streamed down a woman’s face as she held her little pigtailed girl high against her chest. “Please,” was all she could manage. “I have a child. Please.”

  As Remy neared the bottom of the stairs, on the dark final landing, the crowd thinned until it was only stragglers, subway workers and a homeless woman playing a saxophone that looked like it had been in a hailstorm. She held her hand open for money, even as she was evacuated, and Remy managed to slip her a dollar as they brushed past one another. Her hand was rough and calloused. “Bless you,” she whispered, and when she had the money, “ass munch.”

  There were smells he associated with newsstands and subway maps, although Remy wondered how these things in themselves could stink. As he descended, though, for just a moment the atmosphere of the subway replaced the acrid flour of The Zero, and he breathed in the burning brakes, roasted chestnuts, and spilled coffee as if it were a beautiful garden.

  The subway cages were empty; Remy had no tokens, but found an open gate. A nervous transit officer, a fat cave cop, was standing on the platform, shifting his considerable weight on black shoes, breathing through a paper surgical mask. He removed the mask and spoke without inhaling. “You the expert?”

  “Why not,” Remy said.

  “Over ’dere,” the cave cop said, replacing the mask. Remy looked down the line to a small staging area, where two other cave cops were putting up police tape while two space-suited agents stood nearby, taking photographs of a backpack leaned against a pillar. White powder appeared to have spilled out from the backpack. “Civilian spotted it. Twelve minutes ago.” The cave cop quickly replaced his mask again. He reached in his pocket and held out a paper mask for Remy, who ignored it, looking back toward the white powder.

  “Maybe this is what it feels like to be a soldier,” Remy said. “That you just move forward because if you stop to think about the context, what it all means, you’ll just go crazy.”

  “What are you talking about?” the subway cop asked through his mask.

  “Nothing.” Remy walked toward the backpack.

  As he got closer, the guys in the space suits approached him. There was a click and a voice came from somewhere in the left suit. “You must be the guy Documentation sent.”

  “I must be,” Remy said.

  The space suit nodded. “Stupid question. Sorry.” He winked. “We found some papers in the bag, near the USUM.”

  “USUM?” Remy asked.

  “Unidentified suspicious materials,” said the other space suit. “There was some cryptic writing in the papers; we think it might be a manifesto of some kind, so they said we had to call you guys in.”

  “Manifesto,” the other agent agreed.

  Remy stepped between the agents and toward the backpack.

  “Hey! What are you doing? Shouldn’t
you wait for…someone?” one of the space suits called after him.

  Remy said, “I am someone.”

  As he got closer, he could see the white powder piled on the ground next to the backpack. He bent down, dipped his finger in the powder, and put it on his tongue.

  “Jesus! What are you doing?” the space suit asked.

  “Creamer,” Remy said, surprised at the disappointment in his own voice. He could hear sirens on the street above. “French vanilla.” He hoisted the backpack and dumped it out on the platform. He poked through the remains: a spiral binder, a bagel in cellophane, a circular birth control pill dispenser, a pack of cigarettes, some matches, and a report on a book: In the Labyrinth. Remy read the report. She didn’t like the book very much. She said it was too diffuse, too hard to follow. He opened the binder. The girl’s name, Ailea Mendez, was in the upper right-hand corner, along with a phone number. He carefully put Ailea Mendez’s manifesto back in the backpack, then straightened and walked over to—

  THE MAN was a lawyer, a good one, if Remy had to guess. He wore a dark suit and tassled loafers, and there was something in the way he leaned his big-assed slacks across the conference table—like a kid showing off a new car to buddies—using a pointer to gesture at the PowerPoint presentation on the wall, a blue screen with red letters that promised to lay out the basic facts of “Applying for Federal Victims Compensation.”

  April was sitting in the chair next to Remy, holding his hand and practically crushing his knuckles in her sweaty fist. She was wearing a white lace sweater buttoned once over a plain shirt and Remy imagined that perhaps that one button was the only thing keeping her from coming apart. She breathed in fits and starts.

  The PowerPoint screen: 1. Survivor/victim agrees to drop any claim against airline, city, federal government, etc….

  “And you’re sure about this part—” the lawyer began.

  “Yes,” April said quickly. “I think so.”

  “Good,” said the lawyer, “because that’s the first step. It’s probably going to be close to ninety-eight percent of victims by the end. So…you’re in good company.” The lawyer smiled with his big picket teeth and clicked to the next screen: 2. Pain and Mental Anguish: a quantifying formula.

  A noise escaped April that was like something between a grunt and a sigh, as if the air had been knocked out of her. She tried to pretend she was clearing her throat. Remy took her hand.

  “Everyone starts with a base of two-fifty,” said the lawyer. He stuck his jaw out and rubbed the right side of his neck, which was covered with a purplish shaving rash the size of a tangerine. “For pain and mental anguish. That’s what the guidelines have determined each life is worth, essentially, at a base level of grieving. Now if we get to the appeal process, we could always plead some special circumstance, but in your case, given the recent estrangement between you and the decedent, we’re probably better off taking the two hundred fifty thousand and not opening up that can of worms.” He stroked the rash on his neck tenderly.

  “There is one issue we need to discuss,” the lawyer said. “And it’s going to be difficult, but it’s necessary. And understand: I have to ask. Is there any chance…someone else…might step forward to make a claim?”

  “Oh.” April’s hand began shaking a little. “Do Derek’s parents want the money? Because I wanted to—”

  “No. No. Not his parents. That’s not what I mean. They could challenge, of course, but since Derek left no will, this falls under the state’s intestacy laws, which reward the entire estate to the spouse, and therefore the entire settlement is yours.”

  “Even though we weren’t together?”

  “Estrangement is not the same as divorce. You could have gotten back together.”

  “We wouldn’t have,” April said quickly.

  “I understand your feelings, but if I may…you don’t know that. Mr. Kraft’s mother and stepfather certainly don’t know that. And the hearing examiner and special master can only follow the Compensation Fund rules, which clearly stipulate that the spouse is entitled to full compensation for pain and suffering. Now, the parents can appeal some aspects of pecuniary loss, especially if the decedent was supporting them or contributing to their income. But no, when I asked if someone else might make a claim what I was talking about was a…woman, a girlfriend…”

  “Oh.” April looked down at her shoes. “There was someone,” she said quietly. She glanced up at Remy, and then looked back down.

  “A woman,” the lawyer said, not a question.

  “Yes.”

  The lawyer turned his body a bit and stopped stroking his rash. Remy thought he seemed…titillated. “Do you think she’ll make a claim?”

  “No,” April said.

  “I understand this is difficult, but I need you to tell me about their relationship just in case some children miraculously appear, or some document in which he agreed to—”

  April seemed to be straining with every word. “There were no children. And she won’t make a claim.”

  The lawyer glanced at Remy. “Nevertheless, I should have the information—”

  “She worked in his office,” April said. “She died, too.”

  “Oh,” said the lawyer, and Remy could tell that the lawyer was somewhat pleased to have this wrinkle out of the way. “Office romance. Sure. Oldest story.” Then he remembered his client. “I’m sorry.”

  “But I do want Derek’s parents to have some of the money,” April said, trying to change the subject.

  The lawyer looked back at April disapprovingly through his bifocals. “I wouldn’t advise that.” Then he looked at Remy, as if hoping he might talk some sense into her. “If you give them money, it doesn’t preclude them from taking action to get more…and in fact, it sends a message that you believe they are deserving.”

  “They are deserving.”

  The lawyer was becoming frustrated. “It is my responsibility to tell you…that you are entitled…to his entire estate. All of it. What you do beyond that, well…” Then, as an afterthought, “But you should know that even if you give his family some money, my fee comes out of the full settlement, and not simply the portion you choose to keep, so you should—”

  He clicked to the next screen. “Remember that.” The screen read: 3. Factoring in Dependents. He swung his head back to the wall.

  “Now. Dependents. You would also be entitled to one hundred fifty thousand for each dependent…but you and your husband had no children, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” April said meekly. “That’s correct.”

  “But at one time you were planning to have children.”

  “No. We weren’t.”

  “I just mean, at one point, there was certainly talk of children,” he said, as if dropping a hint. “Young couple…that kind of thing.”

  “No. I told you. We were separated.”

  “Right. I understand. We’ve established that. But surely at some point you talked about having children.”

  “No. It never came up.”

  He turned his body again, wearily, as if it were a strain to look away from his PowerPoint presentation, and his hand went quickly back to the rash on his neck. “Look. Mrs. Kraft. I don’t mean to tell you what to say, but what couple doesn’t at least talk about having children? See? These are the kinds of details that can influence the examiner and the special master and have an impact on compensation—”

  “We had no plans for kids.”

  “—a young, attractive couple, their lives ahead of them, who had once planned for a family but were going through a difficult period, a temporary trial separation—”

  “I can’t have children,” April said quietly. “I had a hysterectomy when I was nineteen.”

  “Oh,” Remy and the lawyer said at the same time. April looked over at Remy.

  The lawyer stuck his jaw out. “Okay. Right.” He opened his mouth, and Remy thought he was going to find some angle to exploit, but perhaps he sensed that he shouldn’t because
he simply nodded and flipped to the next PowerPoint screen: 4. Computing Future Earnings.

  The lawyer took out a pair of glasses, put them on, and looked through the bifocals at the chart on the wall. “This is going to be woefully less than the decedent actually could have earned…that’s just the way these settlements are being paid out…but you should know that in your case, we’re going to try for more because, frankly, this is one of the few areas where we can make up some ground. Now, the tables, based on age and income put…” He looked down at his legal pad to find the name. “…Derek’s total future earnings at two-point-two million, but we’re going to ask for three based on the high-risk high-reward nature of business law, and his potential for making partner based on evaluations from his personnel records. They won’t give you that much, but we need to ask. Now, if you could bring pay stubs, W-2s, copies of your income tax, any bonus letters he might have gotten…that will help us greatly.”